Forum Picture Posting And Other Interesting Things to Do

Sun Dec 16, 2007 6:17 pm

Forum Picture Posting And Other Interesting Things You Can DoPicture posting seems to be an issue that everyone deals with at some point on FarmallCub.com. It is really pretty simple after you learn the ins and outs of the post editor.

Post Editing WindowThe bulletin board software (BBC) used for FarmallCub.com has a post editing screen which allows you to do some minor formatting and include images and internet links. The basic approach is similar to HTML in that it uses tags to tell the posting software what to do. Imagine you want to make a word stand out. In a WYSIWYG editor, such as Word, you would highlight the word, and press the BOLD button. In the background of the WYSIWYG editor, the program knows to put a START BOLD flag at the beginning of the word and STOP BOLD flag at the end. If you did not have the STOP BOLD flag, then anything after START BOLD would remain bold until the end of the document.

The same process happens using the forum posting software. There are a pair of tags to make things bold, another pair to tell the software to create a hyperlink to someplace on the net, and on and on. The start or opening flag is one or more letters surrounded by square brackets. To start BOLD, you would have this in front of the word [b]. The end or close flag is the same as the open flag, EXCEPT it has a forward slash / preceding the letter(s), like this [‌‌/b]. These tags can be applied either by clicking the button in the editor, or by typing the tags in. Here are the tag pairs in common usage:

In addition, tags can be used on top of each other. It is very simple to have text that is both bold and underlined by putting both sets of tags around the text. But try to have your tags nested. Here are two examples with the tags shown and the result. In the 1st example, we expect that brown fox will be both bold and underlined, and jumped is just underlined. But that is not what happened. Overlapping tags may not give us the result we want.

The place to try out different features of the editing software is in the Sandbox environment. You know what they say... "What ever happens in the Sandbox, stays in the Sandbox". Let's look at some of the things you can do in post editor and at the results.

Pictures, Photos, Images, Since posting images seems to be a problem for many people, here are some things that may make it easier.

The picture/photo/image must reside somewhere on the net. The easiest is to setup an account on Cubfest Photo Gallery but there are other photo hosting sites as well. Until you upload the image from your computer to the net, it is invisible to the software.

Once the photo is on the net, the easiest way to get the URL is to view the image in your browser, then put your cursor on the image and right click the mouse button. One of the entries in the Firefox context menu is Copy Image Location. On Internet Explorer, it is a little harder. There you will get a menu entry called Properties, click that and search for Address (URL). Then highlight it and copy it.

The image must be of a type the software understands such as .GIF, .JPG, etc.

The image must be tagged with the [img]<picture%20location%20goes%20here>[/img] tags.

In the editor window, the [img]<picture%20location%20goes%20here>[/img] tags must not have any spaces or carriage returns between the tag and the image location.

Make sure you are getting image you want. In the Cubfest Photo Gallery, there are actually 3 different copies of the image. A small thumbnail as seen when browsing a gallery, a "normal" image seen when you click on a thumbnail, and the "real" image that was uploaded. Here is an example of the 3 different images, all for the "Stubby Cubby"

Now that you have the information, go to the Sandbox environment and play. If you want to find more information on the wonderful, wacky world of BBC Code, do a search on the net.

I would appreciate any feedback you have. This link will take you to the Feedback thread: Shade Tree Feedback

Last edited by Dennis on Sat May 22, 2010 3:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:Changed to a topic sticky -- great information on posting and linking photo's.